Collaborative communities are learning communities aimed at accomplishing common goals within often complex collaboration ecosystems. Their development requires catalyzing the process of co-discovering collaborative common ground. BoostINNO was an EU networking project aimed at building a collaborative community in which ten major European cities who are leaders in social innovation shared knowledge lessons learnt. We show how the CommunitySensor participatory community network mapping methodology and the Kumu online network visualization tool were combined to support participatory collaboration mapping among the BoostINNO community members. Two experiments were conducted: (1) finding collaboration partners and (2) comparing social innovation lessons learnt on urban spaces developed by each of the cities. We found that the mapping process indeed helped to trigger and focus productive sensemaking conversations. Limitations include the complexities of the maps, the mapping technology, and lack of dedicated time for sensemaking processes. Still, promising proof of concept has been shown in using participatory collaboration mapping for common agenda setting towards collective impact.
Public libraries are cornerstones of civil society. They form the “third places” where individual citizens meet and mingle, get informed, learn, as well as form and share opinions. Increasingly, however, public libraries are also seen as the meeting and co-working hubs of the many communities making up the rich fabric of urban society. Thus, public libraries are getting new, societal roles as city labs and social innovation catalysts.
The Tilburg Public Library is known for its groundbreaking library innovations, such as the recently opened LocHal, which is truly a “world-class urban living room for Tilburg in an iconic former locomotive shed of the Dutch National Railways”. More about that in a future post. Another one of its strategic innovations concerns the KnowledgeCloud, the “network in which persons, communities and organisations meet one another both online and offline to discuss current, societally relevant themes”. It has grown into a national library project, including several other Dutch public libraries as well as the Dutch Royal Library.
From 2013-2015, I was the project leader for developing the initial demonstrator of this KnowledgeCloud. In the project, I used my experience with knowledge sharing for social innovation to help conceptualize the KnowledgeCloud methodology, network, and platform. This rich experience has convinced me even more of the crucial role that public libraries all over the world (should) play in dealing with many of the complex, “wicked” problems playing out at the local and regional levels.
Because of my relevant expertise, I was asked to participate as an external expert in the CIDES project. Since 2017, I have been on several working visits to Brno and Prague. It is a very inspiring project to be involved in, because of its scope and importance, as well as the professionalism and dedication (not to mention the great sense of Czech humor ;-)) of the library studies team involved.
CIDES focuses on (1) collecting and analyzing practical social innovation lessons learnt by public libraries across the country, (2) refining and extending the most promising of those lessons through a range of incubators and accelerators – and (3) disseminating these lessons nation-wide. Underlying the approach is a solid methodology, of which the CommunitySensor methodology is becoming an integral part.
One way we use CommunitySensor is to chart the local social innovation collaboration ecosystems around participating Czech public libraries. As we are using the same mapping language for all library maps, it also becomes easier to do cross-case analysis, integrate maps, and even see connections at the national level.
More Czech connections: mapping public library social innovation ecosystems together
We have also done several mapping experiments to test and validate the participatory aspects of the methodology. Two of these experiments – one in Prague and one in Brno – nicely demonstrate the gist of the approach:
Mapping the social innovation ecosystem around the Prague Public library
In March 2018, we conducted a mapping experiment with around 35 librarians of the Prague municipal library. In break out groups, the librarians were to come up with local social innovation themes, then select and map existing or proposed initiatives that would fit those themes. We then all together tried to make sense of the emerging bigger picture in the concluding plenary discussion. This process was considered very valuable by participants for building a joint sense of understanding and ownership. It also helped to validate and inform the CIDES methodology for collecting, connecting, and scaling up social innovation lessons learnt with public libraries. This visual impression should convey the spirit of the mapping session:
Mapping the collaboration ecosystem around the #Brno2050 common agenda
Another experiment took place in Brno in October 2018. The city of Brno has invested heavily in an ambitious public agenda setting process to ask local stakeholders what their city should look like in 2050: #Brno2050. By design it has been a very participatory process to come up with the themes that matter to and are co-owned the citizens of Brno:
However, how to make these themes work in practice? How to go from idea(l)s to working, aligned initatives, projects, and programmes with collective impact? How to pool resources that were already there, acknowledging that Brno is a truly smart city in terms of its large social capital formed by its many vibrant communities?
To support this common agenda setting process for the city, we explored if and how we could use our emerging participatory collaboration mapping approach for social innovation in and by public libaries.
To this purpose, we held an initial meeting to do a quickscan of the existing Brno collaboration ecosystem, using the #Brno2050 city themes as a starting point. About 30 participants – including many stakeholders representing various Brno social innovation initiatives – gathered at the Brno Jiří Mahen Library. We asked them to make a rough inventory of their own and other initiatives that they knew of. On the fly, we added as many of these initiatives as we could to the draft #Brno2050 ecosystem map, so that many of the hidden connections between the initiatives were made visible immediately. We then again had a lively plenary discussion in which the participants commented on the collaboration patterns they saw emerging. It was a very fruitful and spirited exchange of ideas. Participants indeed saw this approach as a way forward to keep building momentum on not just dreaming about the long term city strategy, but also making it actually work in the long run. Representatives of the municipality were enthusiastic and committed to investigate if this approach could become part of their urban planning process.
To conclude this post, a visual summary capturing the involvement of the workshop participants building (on) their common city agenda:
More details about our methodology and the experiments we conducted will be shared in future research papers. This blog at least should give you a sneak preview of the cutting edge work currently being done in the Czech Republic on making public libraries catalyze social innovation.
Tilburg is at the heart of a region in the southern Netherlands which has traditionally been very socially innovative. This tradition is celebrated annually during the European Social Innovation Week, recently renamed to the Dear Future week.
The TilburgsAns open source typeface
At the conclusion of this week, the annual Social Innovation Awards are announced. This year’s Runner-Up Award was won by TilburgsAns, a unique initiative by Sander Neijnens and Ivo van Leeuwen, two local graphic designers who developed an open source “typeface for a sans serif city” of letters and icons. From the jury report:
The project especially focuses on Tilburg residents. By using the typeface, they connect with the city and each other. Still, its use is not restricted to Tilburgers alone. Also, people outside of the city can download TilburgsAns and apply it, creating a virtual bond with Tilburg. For the initiators, TilburgsAns is not about city marketing or city branding, but it is an innovative art project with the aim of uniting people through (visual) language. Furthermore, TilburgsAns makes visible – in an innovative way – the material and immaterial heritage of the city via its icons.
This immediately piqued my interest. As you know, I am an ardent believer in the power of visualization and mapping to build, strengthen, and link communities. Furthermore, I have been a long-time resident of Tilburg, a city I have come – like so many other non-natives – to appreciate over the years as a hotbed of cultural and social innovation. It is not so much a remarkable city architecture-wise. What makes it such a pleasure to live here are the interesting and compassionate people and the multitude of inspiring initiatives they organize.
On icons
In my CommunitySensor mapping methodology, icons play a crucial role. They are at the core of the visual language, I use to map the linkages and collaborations taking place in community networks. However, for sensemaking between communities, we need standard icons. For example, in the map below of a community network mapping project in Malawi we see how standard icons act as “conceptual bridges” between two projects, outlining how they have activities, stakeholders, and resources in common.
CommunitySensor standardized community network mapping icons
What interested me so much about the TilburgsAns icon set, is that they are the opposite of standardized icons. Each of the icons is unique, capturing part of that distinctive “sense of Tilburg community”. Together, they define the essence of the city, its people, initiatives and events, sites & sights, and language.
TilburgsAns unique city icons
This contrast between both icons sets and their uses – making connections across communities versus communicating the identity of a city – really got my mind racing. Perhaps, effective community network mapping needs a mix of both: (1) unique community icons to visualize what the community is about, strengthen bonds and ties between community members, and clarify its essence to the outside world – and (2) standardized community mapping icons to catalyze inter-communal sensemaking, collaboration, and “knowledge weaving for social innovation”.
The Tilburg Legend(s) map
Lots of food for thought, here, but instead of going off on an academic tangent, I decided to do something practical to get a better sense of the “deep meaning” of TilburgsAns, and to make a contribution to the Tilburg commons myself, building on the magnificent work of Sander and Ivo. Instead of just seeing the list of Tilburg icons, why not – literally – put them on the map?
To this purpose, I created two Google maps, the English Tilburg Legend(s) map and the Dutch Tilburgse Iconen, playing with the notions of legends defining Tilburg both story and icon-wise.
The Tilburg Legend(s) map
On each map, the relevant icons from the TilburgsAns list have been ordered in the categories People, Initiatives & Events, and Sites & Sights. Only the TilburgsAns word-icons without a clear geographical reference have been left out. By hovering over an item in the table of contents on the left hand side, you can see where it is situated on the map. By clicking a table of contents entry or an icon on the map, a brief description is shown, copied from the TilburgsAns entry. For example, when clicking the icon of Peerke Donders – one of the iconic “sons of the city” – the following description is shown:
The Google Maps description of the Peerke Donders icon
When next clicking the link within the description, one is taken to the actual TilburgsAns page for that description, which – besides that text – also shows the full-size icon, plus links to further information:
The TIlburgsAns description of Peerke Donders showing both the enlarged icon and links to further information.
Like so many things in social innovation, this mapping experiment is only a work-in-progress. The map is far from complete, and comes with many technical limitations, for instance, Google Maps only showing small icons or rather crude descriptions. Still, it has many potential applications, for example in providing a different, off-the-beaten-track view on the city to new residents and visitors.
The experiment also shows how one social innovation may lead to another, in often unexpected ways. Together, these social innovations form a web of catalysts for social change, strengthening our precious common good. In desperate times of societal polarization, alienation, and fragmentation, it is such initiatives that are potent symbols of that there is still much worth preserving and fighting for together.
Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands.
URBACT is an EU programme that aims “to enable cities to work together and develop integrated solutions to common urban challenges, by networking, learning from one another’s experiences, drawing lessons and identifying good practices to improve urban policies.”
BoostInno is one of the networks developed in URBACT, with the aim to “enable public administrations to play a new role as public booster and brokers/facilitators of social innovation activities/projects/policies, by driving social innovation in, through and out the public sector.” Member cities include Gdansk (PL)-Lead partner, Paris (FR), Milan (IT), Turin (IT), Braga (PT), Barcelona (ES), Wroclaw (PL), Skane County (S), Baia Mare (RO), Strasbourg (FR), plus Lviv (UA) as an observer.
In preparation of one of its working meetings in Barcelona in November, I was asked to map the collaboration of the BoostInno network. Goal was to see if mapping this collaborative community of cities could help its members to make better sense of whom to work with and on what themes. In particular, at this meeting, each city was to make a selection of other cities in the network to plan site visits to. Given that there were 11 cities present in Barcelona, and that there was only little dedicated time to meet and discuss with potential partners, it was felt that a map showing the common ground might be really helpful.
Prior to the meeting, we sent out a survey asking all cities to briefly describe 5 of their “flagship projects”, local projects that could serve as showcases of what they had to offer and share with their European peers. We also asked them to tag their projects with topics from the list of URBACT “Urban Topics”, concrete social innovation topics that cities work on and that URBACT has grouped in categories such as Integrated Urban Development, Economy, Environment, Governance, and Inclusion. Besides mapping those elements, I also added what “sharings” (concrete offerings) the cities wanted to “give” to and “use” from other cities. The resulting map literally shows the common ground of the BoostInno network, making it much easier to identify what is the common focus, but also to identify one’s own position and interests in the bigger scheme of things.
At the conference, I first presented the overall map, showing the big picture. However, I also set up a “mapping station”, where representatives of the various cities could come and see me. I then gave each of them a personalized tour showing how their city was positioned on the map, and what themes and projects of other cities theirs was most closely related to. In this way, precious meeting time could be used as efficiently as possible, as city representatives could more easily identify the potentially most relevant partners – also present in Barcelona – to talk to.
building communities depends on our capacities to intervene, to show results, to create maps, that allow intuitive sensemaking processes to exist. This in turn develops a common vision amoung participants, creating a very strong “social glue”. If used as tools for cross-fertilisation, for integrated action planning and doing, this kind of knowledge and feeling can be translated into political arguments, working at the core of the present crisis we are living through, where a total lack of trust has become what is common, but not what gives sense and unites different stakeholders.
As a now validated URBACT “Ad-Hoc Expert”, I aim to continue to work with the BoostInno team to weave my participatory community mapping methodology into the emerging social innovation approach of the network. I am excited to have this opportunity to keep working together with such committed people on ways to strengthen and share lessons about European collaboration on social innovation at the city level, the level where the conditions for the future prosperity and peace of our continent are being created… To be continued.
Update July 14, 2017: A video interview held with me in Barcelona about the mapping project was just published:
My community mapping work is taking off. I have been very busy with it, and have had little time to share the stories recently. Upcoming a series of blog posts introducing some of the very interesting mapping projects I have been doing since last year.
This first post is about starting mapping processes to support community building in two “centres of expertise” coordinated by the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
The RDM Centre of Expertise
The RDM Centre of Expertise has as its mission to develop better technical education, as well as new knowledge and sustainable innovations required by the Port and City of Rotterdam. It does so by supporting collaboration between educational institutes, research centres and corporations in a range of projects, also involving university lecturers and students. This collaboration takes place in a network of currently 7 communities of practice (CoPs).
Community mapping was considered to have potential to visualize the collaboration ecosystem not only within but especially across the various communities. To explore this potential, a pilot was conducted with two of the communities of practice: CoP Logistics and the CoP Future Mobility. These communities were selected as the community managers were already exploring cross-overs between the projects associated with their communities.
In several iterations, a pilot Kumu map was produced, in which the focus was to find out the overlaps between projects and stakeholders between the different communities. It also shows the links with the educational institutes and programmes of the university, which is key, as these provide the centre with the students and researchers doing the applied research. This map is now being extended by the community managers and researchers of the CoE to make it cover increasingly more common ground.
The EMI Centre of Expertise
Another Rotterdam mapping case concerns EMI – the Expertise Centre Social Innovation. This expertise centre focuses on addressing complex societal issues – “wicked problems” – related to living, working, care & well-being, and education in the district of Rotterdam-South, in which many of these problems are prevalent.
As a pilot, we developed an experimental map of one of the communities fostered by the expertise centre around its research and outreach programmes: “New in 010” (010 being the area code for Rotterdam). In this programme, Obstetrics and Social Work and Services students support vulnerable pregnant women through house visits and organizing social events.
Whereas in the RDM Centre of Expertise the map focuses on visualizing project and stakeholder bridges between communities, the EMI map zooms in more on the activities and events within a community, as well as – again – the links with the educational institutes and programmes. Choosing the right “zoom level” is an essential design choice in community mapping projects. If you want to know more, check out this post on how to use community mapping with Kumu for collaborative sensemaking.
Society consists of a web of interconnected communities. A large body of research and practice exists on how to make communities work. Still, the intersection and interaction of multiple communities – the development and use of their inter-communal commons – is ill-understood. Social innovation is the process in which relevant stakeholders jointly develop solutions to wicked problems that none of them can solve on their own. As such, it is a prime example of the need for multiple stakeholder communities collaborating. We propose a process for building a networked community-commons called knowledge weaving. This is a reflective sensemaking effort in which existing communal knowledge sharing practices, initiatives, and resources are tied together into coherent commons-based knowledge fabrics that support intercommunal collaboration, such as for social innovation. We illustrate the approach with the case of the European Social Innovation Week 2015 pre-events.
Hoe breng je een community in kaart; de case van de Tilburgse Stadse Boeren
Communities en netwerken zijn een essentieel onderdeel van de kennismaatschappij. ‘Community mapping’ is een krachtige techniek om de samenhang en samenwerking binnen communities en netwerken in kaart te brengen. CommunitySense heeft een participatieve methodiek ontwikkeld om dergelijke communitykaarten te maken en in te zetten voor het versterken van communities.
De methodiek bestaat uit een visualisatie ‘taal’, een ondersteunende online tool en een proces voor het maken en gebruiken van communitykaarten. In dit seminar staat de case van de Tilburgse Stadse Boeren centraal. In deze case is een eerste versie van de methodiek ontwikkeld en toegepast voor het maken van een overzichtskaart van deze community (http://bit.ly/1L0jusT).
In het seminar worden de geleerde lessen besproken en wordt een demonstratie gegeven van de gebruikte tool, Kumu. Daarna ga je met elkaar in gesprek over hoe community mapping een rol zou kunnen spelen bij het versterken van Social Innovation.
Wil je het verhaal weten achter deze communitykaart? Wil je weten hoe je community mapping in jouw activiteiten succesvol kunt toepassen? Kom dan naar het seminar en meld je aan via info@poweredbysocialinnovation.nl.
Last October, I gave an invited talk at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, USA. Topic of my talk was “Knowledge Sharing for Social Innovation: The Dutch Tilburg Regional Case”. I published the slides of my talk in a previous post. In the meantime, however, with the help of the good people of Rutgers’ IT staff, I worked on creating an indexed YouTube version of the video recording that was made of my presentation. In it, you can find the Tilburg story of knowledge sharing for social innovation. It contains the slides combined with my presenting them, plus a very lively Q&A with the audience afterwards. In this YouTube video, you can watch me tell the full story. Click here to get a larger version (handy for reading those crowded slides!).
If you want to jump to a particular topic, see the index below the video.
Social innovation as a process is about multiple stakeholders working together on joint, economically and socially sustainable solutions for wicked societal problems. Social innovation both co-creates value for individual stakeholders involved, and contributes to the common good. It has been an important theme in the the Dutch city of Tilburg and the surrounding region of Midden-Brabant for years. A successful regional social innovation ecosystem exists. Knowledge sharing about the innovations remains a bottleneck, however. Two initiatives to increase regional social innovation knowledge sharing capacity are presented: the social innovation storytelling architecture and the Tilburg public library prototype KnowledgeCloud for catalyzing knowledge sharing across regional themes of interest.
Making CommunitySense 
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